


blue roads, blue skies

by gatsbyparty



Series: Elevator-stuck [3]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Elevatorstuck, Friendship, Gen, Humanstuck, Recreational Drug Use, Road Trips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-08
Updated: 2012-09-08
Packaged: 2017-11-13 20:35:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,393
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/507471
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gatsbyparty/pseuds/gatsbyparty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dave and Aradia roadtrip from DC to Boston. They do drugs.</p>
            </blockquote>





	blue roads, blue skies

It’s mid-July in DC and it’s hot and humid and Dave Strider has just had the best idea of his life while lying in the stairwell. It’s the only place in this impressively shitty motel that’s got air con, probably because the manager, owner, and single employee’s office is beside the stairs. Both his head phones have fallen out and the cords are tangled over a notebook full of old music theory notes. 

He’s going to road trip back to Boston. What makes this his best idea is that he’s going to invite Aradia Megido, the unbearably creepy girl who’s in town for the same series of lectures on causality and time travel. He’s pretty sure she’s from Southie; she says fucking as fawkin.

“Speak of the devil and he shall appear,” he says, tipping his head back onto the hideous carpeting to look at Aradia upside-down. She’s bent over, head tilted. Her eyes are the same color as the barrel of ink in a red pen.

“Oh, so you are real,” she says. Dave might be hallucinating the she sounds a bit disappointed. He pushes himself upright, snapping his notebook closed.

“Yeah, unfortunate as hell, I’ve come to the conclusion I’m solidly corporeal. It puts a real damper on my day. “

“So you’re not dead, either?”

“Can’t say as I am.”

“Congratulations!”

“Much appreciated. You’re leaving tonight, right?”

“Yes, I have to be back by Friday. Why?”

“Consider the idea you’ve just been given a totally serious proposition by the coolest person in this city and possibly the country-purely metaphysically, we’re talking here, because it is hot as balls in this city and I am intimately familiar with hot cities, and that this proposition may result in multiple illicit side ventures that will, in turn, result in greater enjoyment of the next two to three hours.”

“Are you talking about getting high and having sex?”

Dave makes a face best referred to with chat smilies(>:I). 

“No, getting high and road tripping back to Boston.”

“Oh! I couldn’t hear that under all your misdirection,” she says with a wide grin. Her teeth are the littlest bit crooked. “You’re going to fill the universe with even more indecipherable white noise if you aren’t careful. We might as well drive together! I’d rather not take the train, honestly, there was a man on it the day before yesterday that looked like a pile of ravioli.”

They set off after dark with the air con cranked, even though it has a weird musty smell like something died under the hood, and six pillows, two dufflebags, a suit jacket, and a pair of sneakers in the back seat. Aradia kicks her heels up onto the dashboard, flicks Dave’s lighter on and off, sings tunelessly to Top 40, refuses to change the station, slaps her hand down over the buttons, and makes a general noisy nuisance of herself. It’s the best thing she could have done. Dave’s head is empty and his throat is hot and the highways are blue and the sky layered into itself like a gold-on-black latticework. She’s howling some god awful Chris Brown drivel when Dave turns off the highway to stop for a piss and they pass a field full of lanterns and people in fancy dress.

He slows down enough that they don’t crash when Aradia jerks on his arm and demand they find out what’s going on. As they get out he pulls on the suit jacket.

It turns out to be a combination engagement party and high schooler’s wet dream. The future bride is all of eighteen. It looks like they’re all wearing their prom clothes and there’s roughly ten thousand kegs hidden in the grass.

“Congratulations,” Aradia says to the future bride, one Joyce Smythe, both of them flushed red. Joyce punches Aradia in the arm and thanks her. Dave sits on the hood of the car, watching Joyce and Aradia dance, and then Aradia vanishes past the lanterns. He stands up to look, catches a flash of black hair and light, and she pops out of the grass beside the car with a beer in one hand and a strip of at least ten condoms hanging from the other. They get back in the car.

“It’s her birthday, too,” Aradia explains as Dave turns onto the highway. “She wanted us to be safe so we didn’t have to get married too. She thought you were fifteen, that’s why you didn’t get a beer.”

“I’m older than you, though. I’m actually twenty one. Committing all sorts of crimes in my poor old car, aren’t you? Is there no extent to which you won’t go? Can you ever be stopped?”

“Not without more effort than you’re willing to give. I can’t be tamed, Dave.”

“Don’t you quote Miley Cyrus at me. I’ll commit.”

"To a career?"

"No, suicide." 

"Oh, right," she says, putting the beer into the one cup holder not full of neon jelly bracelets. “That could make all sorts of terrible puns, couldn’t it?”

“Yeah?”

“Like, committing, making a decision. To kill yourself. And. Doing it.”

Dave his head enough to make a face at Aradia but not far enough to risk driving over the guardrail. That is possibly the worst thing he’s ever heard, and he tells her so. She makes a little snarly noise, pulling her lip up past her canines, and then turns it into a grin.

“The amount of sense that makes is inversely proportionate to the amount of sense it didn’t make.”

“Dave, I think you might be lying to me!”

“Mark me down for the record as not giving a fuck, Rad. Rayd. Shit.”

“It’s more like rahd,” she says, eyes making triangles of amusement. This is when Dave realizes he never actually pissed at the piss stop, and he forces himself another three miles up into Pennsylvania before he pulls into an empty IHOP. Dave and Aradia look at each other, poker-faced, and what comes next is simultaneously a great and horrible idea. The pipe is packed in six seconds flat. Aradia burns her face before Dave just flips the lighter upside down, spins the wheel, and waits for her to inhale. She doesn’t stop sucking in until she starts coughing. She drains the rest of the beer, spilling a little of it onto her shirt, and swipes hard at her mouth with the back of her hand.

“Oh my god,” she says, “That is absolutely revolting. Can I do it again?”

“Wait your turn, grasshopper.”

Dave goes, hits it again to kill the ember, and passes it over. It’s mostly ash by now, the glass getting hot in Aradia’s fingers, and after her hit Dave raps it empty over the window and shuts off the car. The old lady waitress in IHOP looks at them strangely, but seats Aradia and points Dave to the bathroom.

“Your boyfriend,” her nametag says DEB, Deb says, “well, he’s just adorable, isn’t he? Reminds me of my Paul. I went to class all day and he worked all night, but we’d eat breakfast together.”

Aradia doesn’t point out that yes, her boyfriend is adorable, but he isn’t Dave, because Deb brings out a mug that looks more like a barrel and she fills it with hot chocolate and the whipped cream is probably three inches thick. Dave gets watery coffee and a dull-eyed glare after he complains.

Aradia’s bacon is a work of art. Dave’s pancakes have sad faces burnt into them with mayonnaise.

Dave knows, somewhere in the hot swampy haze his mind has become, that he’s full after six pancakes, ten pieces of bacon, and three cups of coffee. There’s still space, though; he knows he can fit the four pack of apple cinnamon muffins and the donuts and the chips Aradia buys before they get back on the highway and the twizzlers in the backseat and maybe another bottle of water, yeah, see, that worked just fine. New York is a state of mind, isn’t it, he hits it flying and the sun rises and he isn’t tired because three cups of coffee lit him on fire and the road stretches for miles, no traffic, the sun is high and the radio is on and the ac is cranked and there’s no stopping them.

It’s a trip for the ages.


End file.
